A letter co-signed by 49 former staff members of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development denouncing efforts by some countries to muffle the institution's voice was released yesterday at a press conference.
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This is getting ridiculous. When President Obama was campaigning and even when he first took office, he claimed that it was a priority to support whistleblowing activities. And yet, as President, he has been ridiculously aggressive in pushing vindictive criminal lawsuits against whistleblowers -- often by abusing the Espionage Act. The Espionage Act is supposed to be used against spies. But the Obama Justice Department has used it over and over a...

By Lynn Parramore, an AlterNet contributing editor. She is cofounder of Recessionwire, founding editor of New Deal 2.0, and author of ‘Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture.’ Follow her on Twitter @LynnParramore. Cross posted from Alternet.
Corporations are not working for the 99 percent. But this wasn’t always the case. In a special five-part AlterNet series, William Lazonick, professor at UMass, president of t...

When Kim Dotcom was granted bail, we noted that it was rather silly that the conditions of bail included a ban on internet access. It appears that pretty much everyone involved in the case has actually agreed, and the terms of bail have been adjusted to allow all of the Megaupload defendants to have internet access. The US didn't even object to this request (which surprises me, actually).
What the US did object to, however, was Dotcom's request ...

So, I'm vain. I share stuff to G+ from Google Reader (this may end soon, just fyi) and I like seeing who comments on, reshares, +1s those things. That means I look at and click on the red button notification at the top right when I'm in GReader.

Today, G+ just got even uglier. When you hover over a person's name (in the list of who's added you) it shows that stupid new banner, too. This is, simply, too much noise in a small-ish space. I could critique it longer, but I don't want to give G+ anymore of my (sacred) attention. (Hint: your attention is sacred, too.) G+ is just getting too ugly, too unuseful, and too insular.

Thus: So long and thanks for all the fish. No more GReader sharing. No more clicking on that Red button. If you need me, I'm over at grossmeier.net/about.

Also, if anyone has any tips on a Fx plugin that will git rid of the ugly top black bar on googe.com properties, send 'em my way!﻿

One of the more bizarre rulings in copyright/file sharing cases was the district court ruling in the IsoHunt search engine case a couple years ago. It's still involved in the appeals process, but the district court is one of the only courts so far to broadly interpret the DMCA's "red flags" rule to mean that general knowledge means you have to block access. The ruling ended up being that IsoHunt basically had to accept a keyword filter from the M...

Maria Pallante, who's only been the US Register of Copyrights for a short while, but has worked in the Copyright Office for some time, has apparently decided that she's going to step up publicly as the copyright-maximalist-in-chief. In two recent talks, she has made it clear that she despises those who fought against SOPA, believes strongly that copyright is the sole way of making money for content creators, and, most disturbing of all, thinks th...

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
An interview with Michael Hudson published on the Russian website Terra America (TA).
What is the place of the Federal Reserve System in the American financial and economic structure?
Prior to the Federal Reserve’s founding in 1913, U.S. monetary policy was conducted by the Treasury. ...